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Show Up against the wall, Suzy Spotless... Yeah, it was a dark day for law enforcement when .Skip n his false arrest suit. Imagine a freak claiming he was harassea y University police! Imagine the courts awarding him $5,00U damag $4,000 of it punitive! lust ask Attorney General Vernon Romney about it. Mr. Romney will SyS all scTo, Laes about how law enforcers everywhere , w, II be scared to death to arrest anybody for fear of a false arres su.t (Tr bune, 1972) It's going to be a world of pathos and anarchy it is. I here win be Ss everywhere, running around distributing leaflets adver , ng poor people's 50 cent-a-plate dinners (as in Sk,p Creeneasej and there will be people taking them, reading them and throw.ng ; them away (as probably happened in Skip Greene's case), but there won t be policemen arresting the freaks for littering, unfortunately. That's just the point, Mr. Romney. The courts have decreed thus far that Green's civil liberties under a number of Constitutional amendments, were violated Thus the courts rendered a judgment against the policemen involved (punitive damages) dam-ages) partially as compensation to Greene and partially as a warning to law enforcers to refrain from harassing freaks. That's the great beauty of our legal system, Mr. Romney. It occasionally permits justice to be done. Will policemen now hesitate to enforce the law? We doubt it, Mr. Romney. The law is very clear about who may be arrested by whom for what under which circumstances in whose presence, and on and on and on. And it is by no means too much to ask that the working policeman know all these things precisely, for a big part of his job is arresting people. Let's face facts, Mr. Romney. No appeal has yet been filed, the court's decision stands, the policemen have failed to prove that they weren't harassing Greene. They arrested him on practically no grounds, he called their bluff, and they lost. The courts seemed to have recognized the illegitimacy of the policemen's case from the beginning, as they dismissed charges against Greene immediately. In forecasting dire consequences for law enforcement, you lose also, Mr. Romney. Oh, there is one circumstance in which Mr. Romney could be right in stating that police will be afraid to do their jobs. That is if their job is to . harass people. Maybe Mr. Romney know: something we don't. |